• by Laurie Sullivan , April 5, 2016

In a move to strengthen attribution for mobile devices, Searchmetrics Tuesday launched a feature that allows marketers to track and compare how mobile apps perform in paid and organic searches.

Marketers can track a specific application's performance against competitors through a Mobile App Rankings feature that analyzes mobile and tablet search performance for Android and iOS apps, down to specific regions.

Attribution is becoming increasingly more complex as the number of Internet-connected devices grows. Searchmetrics said the rankings offer data on search performance and insights for more than 700 mobile and local search engine combinations. A report provides a weekly a "winners and losers" list showing the mobile apps that outperform.

Google and other search engines are increasingly displaying mobile apps as potential answers to user queries in mobile search results, making search an important channel for driving app installs and attracting traffic, engagement and app conversions.

Searchmetrics also made updates to a few features such as the ability to identify competitive keywords by viewing high-traffic topics on competitors' sites by analyzing the site's content and keyword strategies -- or an alert system that provides an early warning through email or HipChat and Slack through real-time messaging. The alerts signal users like WebMD to problems found during a scheduled search engine bot crawl. 

Visibility Guard, one of Searchmetrics' platforms, found and alerted WebMD that mobile pages of its heart disease content were accidentally coded, preventing search engines from finding them when crawling the Web for content, according to Alicia Anderson, SEO manager at WebMD, who stated that the tool caught the error before Google's search engine bot crawled WebMD's entire site.